Oil, Water and Stripes

It lies in puddles at the bottom of bowls and clings to the sides of serving spoons. It seeps into aloo and coats paranthas, lingering on your plate long after you’ve finished your food. Worst of all, it absorbs into your skin, staining your nails yellow and leaving a warm salty smell that lasts for hours. In Madhya Pradesh, oil is inescapable.

Sure, you can rinse your hand. But the water runs warm and is tinged brown with iron. The dry air makes your throat perpetually itch yet water only exacerbates the thirst. Here in Kanha, people share water like they do tiger stories, continuously passing, craving, filling. When you enter a house, it’s the first offering – “Panni?” (water?); when you leave the reserve, the first question – “Tiger?”. Unfortunately, be it water or tiger sightings, neither satisfies the burning desire for more. Sahas and I listen as tourists exchange stories while they gulp down glasses, exchanging, competing, outdoing. This morning we watched as the tourist jeeps returned from safari an hour early – a tiger had been sitting in a waterhole near the entrance gate; one look and they returned, full of stories about the tiger and the tiger only.

 

The tiger we saw on a tiger show in Kanha.

Climate change predictions foreshadow hotter, dryer summers with more scattered monsoon rains (Kumar et al. 2006). I wonder to myself, if the waterholes dry and the tigers diminish, how then will people quench their thirst?

The Kanha Nature Trail: 7 Kilometers Too Scenic

We hit the trail at 5:30pm in the evening, an hour and a half before sunset. The Kanha Nature Trail began innocently enough, with a three-story watch tower and a path down to the nala (stream). Our boots scuffing against the red gravel, Sahas and I paced and paused, lifting our binoculars and calling out names of the shadows among the trees. As the trail wound its way among rocky patches and burned forest, we saw an Indian tree shrew cleaning itself with its long red tongue and spangled drongos weaving their way through branches.

At a fork in the trail, we turned left to follow an older trail into denser forest. More drongos and langurs, more boulders and burned forest. An hour later, the world grew dark through our binoculars and we quickened our pace. As the trail continued, so did our thirst. We had forgotten to bring water despite the evening heat. As dusk fell, I mentally inventoried our pocket contents – a few rupee notes, a mango candy, a mobile with no signal, and thankfully, a torch that Sahas had brought along had taken at the last minute.

We walked faster, Sahas leading and me running to keep up from behind. The trail continued. As the stars emerged above, the boulders around me shifted to panthers, the crackling leaves beneath me growling with each step. And then in the distance, a horn and a light, and suddenly the sal forest revealed a road and a resort, with lights to guide us ahead. Sahas had joked earlier that we were hiking to the other side of the park but as the resort sign swung in the night breeze, we realized that our 20 minute nature trail had turned into 7 kilometers. We asked the resort night guard and he gestured ahead, “Sida jao…long distance”. Sahas withdrew his cell phone and there they were – three glorious bars of signal. He called a friend and 15 minutes later we were cruising down the road to our forest rest house, parched, exhausted and exhilarated from our walk among tigers.

The Power of Protection: Pench Tiger Reserve

Over the past two weeks we visited Pench and Kanha Tiger Reserves. In Pench we stayed at Karmajhiri Gate and met up with Aniruddha, a PhD from the Wildlife Institute of India. He’s been studying tiger ecology and dispersal for the past four years at Pench, using camera traps and scat analysis to estimate the population and evaluate movement around the park.

 

A sambar deer grazes in the forest.

 

Wild dogs play along the roadside by our jeep.

Pench is starkly different from Tadoba. Unlike Tadoba, where bamboo stands thick and evenly dispersed through the forest and the undergrowth is otherwise clear of vegetation, Pench has few bamboo clumps and thick lantana for tigers, deer and antelope to hide in. Space in the reserve is highly seasonal, with much of the land submerged by a dammed reservoir during the monsoon and winter months. During our visit the mating season was in full swing. The forest resounded with the echoing calls of meowing male peacocks, their tales rising and turning amongst the dry grasses, and asthmatic bellows of chital (spotted deer) parading around their sprawling racks.

 

Interviewing people in a large village near Pench Tiger Reserve.

While the drought of 2009 in Tadoba prevented interior villages from planting their one crop (rice, which requires standing water), Pench received enough scattered rain that the villagers could harvest one (maize) of their two crops (the second is wheat). We saw the difference in moisture most prominently in the animals. Tadoba gaur (bison) grazed near dried waterholes, their rear back bones concave and their ribs tight against their dark coats, while their equivalents in Pench roamed in shaded forest and drank from permanent natural pools in the Pench River. 

Stories from local villagers reinforced these differences and presented surprising new ones: Pench is remarkably conflict-free. Since the core of Pench is vacant of villages, we spoke with several villages in the buffer of the park, bordering on territorial (non-park) forest. No matter who we talked with – forest officials, researchers, local politicians, farmers – everyone shook their head at my inquiry into livestock depredation. Few to no livestock are killed by tigers and leopards in the 99 villages surrounding Pench, and no one can remember a case of the big cats injuring or killing a person. As expected, crop raiding and wolf attacks on goats and children were their main complaints, but I was stunned to learn that conflict with the top carnivores of the park is virtually nonexistent. Pench may well serve as a “control” site for comparison against parks with higher levels of conflict, such as Tadoba or even Kanha.

 

Although villagers outside Pench keep their cows beneath bamboo-thatched stalls at night, attacks on livestock by tigers are surprisingly rare.